He was a fixture around Springfield Avenue and South 10th Street in Newark. He was a regular at checker games on Brenner Street, a block away. He worked on cars in the neighborhood, using the streets as his garage. Oil changes, spark plugs, brake shoes; whatever he could do with tools and parts he could carry. On Mondays at the First Corinthian Baptist Church, he helped at the food bank, then took some back home.

Home was an abandoned Toyota Sienna minivan, parked outside a boarded house and a vacant lot next to a closed mattress factory. Yes, Slim was homeless. But he wasn’t neighborless.

"He was thinking of renting a room, but he didn’t want to put up with people’s nonsense. He said he’d rather sleep in his truck," said Ernestine Brown, one of his many neighborhood friends who knew him "15, 20 years."

In the early morning of Feb. 5, when outside temperatures were in the high 20s and streets ice-glazed from freezing rain, Slim was keeping warm with a camping heater hooked to a grill-sized propane tank. Two more tanks were stored in the van, and the explosion turned it into an incinerator.

Hopefully, Slim never knew what hit him. Suffice it to say police could not identify him through fingerprints.

So he remains unidentified.

"We have an open investigation trying to identify this poor guy," said Thomas Fennelly, head of the Essex prosecutor’s violent crimes division. "It became our investigation because we weren’t sure what we had, but we’re satisfied it was an accident."

Everybody knew Slim. Slim, the guy who lived in a car and could fix a car.

"He did the brake shoes on my car," H.C. Brown said, nodding to his silver, polished Nissan Pathfinder with the words "Blues Man" detailed on the back. "He did a good job, too."

"No one ever knew his last name — he was just Slim," said Katie Wilkens, while watching Brown and Cleveland Cook play checkers on a board balanced on a 5-gallon spackle drum on Brenner Street.